794064 - Support some sort of home page button/shortcut in Firefox for Metro

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Metro Graveyard :: App Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

If you have your home page set to about:start, you begin with the StartUI visible. However if you have your home page set to something else, ways of getting to about:start are fairly clumsy:

1) open a new tab to get the start ui there

2) swipe to bring down the address bar and load about:start in the current tab

3) swipe to bring down the address bar, tap in the address bar, enter a single letter to bring up autocomplete, backspace to remove the letter you typed

I'd suggest we add some sort of a home button to the address bar that flips between about:start and the user's default home page.

Comment 1

[Allison Naaktgeboren :ally]

this is hanging off of the startui tracking bug, which is on the mvp list.

It does not appear to me that we have this factored into the ux or have a plan for this?

Comment 2

[Yuan Wang(:Yuan) – Mobile Firefox Design Lead]

I don't agree that adding a home screen btn will make the entire experience better.

First, for people who don't have startup sites customized(probably majority of our users), home tab and new tab are doing the same thing, which will feel redundant or confusing for a lot of our users(especially people who are young and living in the mobile world). 

Second, for people who have startup sites customized, they can also go backwards, or adding a new tab to access Start page. If they found doing that difficult, maybe they will change their startup back to Start page, or add start page to one of the startup sites.

Overall, we should educate users to take better advantage of new Start Page rather than compromise our UI to serve the traditional mental model. I know desktop Firefox has been talking about merging Home Tab and New Tab for a long time. And FX on Win8 should be a great example to show the benefits of merging them together.

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

customizing the start page is out for v1. If users need a custom start screen, they can use a secondary tile (pinned an alternate page to the Windows Start screen.)

Comment 4

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

I agree this suffers from the same confusion inherited from desktop's home vs new tab screens. But we still need a solution for metro. Currently clicking the + button for new tab is the workaround which feels awkward especially as compared to the various affordances windows gives you for getting back to their start screen.
One possibility would be to make "start" sticky in the addressbar suggestions list

Comment 5

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

Removing 'uiwanted' keyword as UX dependency bug has been created which blocks bug 794064.

Comment 6

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Mass close of bugs in obsolete product https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350354